Teaching Art Online

A prospective graduate student came by a few weeks ago. His goal as he stated it is to minimize damage to rural students by providing quality arts instruction online or through distance education in other means. I worry.
I told him that I worried, arts education is a field that requires demonstratin, proximity and more than anything else mentoring. This kind of mentoring is extremely hard to reproduce at a distance. I think that the ability to look at the dancers moves from multiple perspectives, the painters brush strokes or the guitarist hands are crucial elements that cannot be done at a distance. I teach distance courses and Ithink some of


them are great- but not in arts education or arts integration.
My second concern was that by creating online replacements we urge districts that have stuck by their specialists and invested in them to stop. If the quality is there, they might say, why not save a bundle. So what can be done instead?
Here are some ideas:
1. Train classroom teachers in arts integration and enhance their understanding through studio experiences with local artists and museum resources.
2. If online lessons are created integrate them with rich artist in residence programs- mandated not just as an option. The experieneces must be bundled and truly integrated.
3. Educate school boards and administrators about the importance of the arts.

Do not let rural schools do without arts....

Learning Design in Educational Apps

In the past few weeks I have started a netcast on using iPads in k12 education (tech edge on iTunesU). My co-host Allison and I spend quite a few hours every week trying to find apps that are educationally sound. The challenge is quite real. What we've learned may not be surprising, but it spells opportunity or disaster. Most of the "educational" apps are based on implicit and false theories of learning and design. This is not a failure of understanding a specific domain (say social studies) but instead a failure of understanding how we learn.
So what do I mean by opportunity or disaster? The opportunity exists for innovation to take over the marketplace with excellently designed educational apps. The disaster will emerge if after schools invest heavily in mobile devices and fail to deliver on learning simply because the apps that carry the lad are subpar.
We will keep looking fir educationally sound apps (or try to get close).
Check out the website and connect to the netcast:
http://cehs15.unl.edu/cms/index.php?s=18&p=190



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thinking Fast and Slow in Education- Part 1

I am currently reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winner Kahneman (see a book review here). I am still processing some of the information (or thinking slowly...) but I see some obvious implications for teaching and technology. The first is the positive bias- we almost always underestimate the challenge and overestimate our capacity, the second is our lack of ability to intuitively understand statistical properties of the world around us.
In  1999 I saw this first hand in a classroom. In a summer school based on Bob Calfee's WordWork we had one kindergarten teacher who claimed to have gone through the eight-week program in three weeks. We were surprised but she claimed that all of her students have a solid grasp of all short vowel CVC words and are ready to advance beyond it. How do you know? we inquired, she replied that she has been observing her students being successful in making words. Since we assessed students in every classroom on a biweekly rotation we soon had some results from the classroom. Only four out of 18 students could actually produce the patterns reliably without repeated teacher cues. In essence the teacher saw her best students succeed and conjectured that all of her students could.
This is the reason that we should have an emphasis on formal assessment points in which we can get an honest estimate of what our students can do- not what we believe or want them to. Often I hear teachers saying - I know this student can do a lot better - yet they didn't. Now, sometimes it is true and due to some setting event, then a retest is in order. But if a student is consistently under-performing in a well designed assessment opportunity- then we have simply overestimated their capacity based on effort, our support for their work etc.

In technology and especially project based learning that is emerging as a major component in the (welcome) push for 21st century skills we need to make sure that we have a solid way to assess achievement that circumvents our biases and gains a real windows to what students can do.

Changing Media

In the past few months I have been carefully planning a shift from writing to video as an expression. I have to admit that it is still very much a work in progress but we finally came up with UNL Tech EDGE available through iTunes U and UNL's Media Hub. Working in a new media is a challenge but I have to admit that I am enjoying it. Maybe it's just a novelty effect...
We have received a grant from Nebraska's Coordinating Commission for Post Secondary Education that will support our professional development efforts across the state. In the grant we combine four professional development days, technology coaching and online resources for teachers- including our netcast about iPads in education.
More soon.

Mentoring

Listening to the authors at the Plum Creek festival Gala (thank you Laurie for the invitation) I was struck by the importance of mentorship mostly informal for the development of "talent". The great illustrator Pinkney told the story of how an established artist took interest in him as he was drawing while selling newspapers and invited him to his studio. The two other speakers that spoke at length also discussed individuals who took interest in them and helped guide their development. As I listened I wondered, do motivated "talented" individuals attract such attention and feed on it or is it a phenomenon that can be expanded and if so. Are we giving students the opportunities to forge such relationships that will lead them to new ideas new images of future selves?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Excellence- Or it's ok to work with talented motivated students too!

The credit to this post goes to Jim Lewis a professor of Math and long time math educator. In a conversation yesterday he said (my memory so the responsibility here is mine) excellent educators I work with are reluctant to focus on working with high achieving students, it only counts when you help struggling students. The question is whether our focus on clsing the gap s leading us to neglect our most talented students. We sometimes assume that those are also motivated and understand their own strengths. Do we have art classes for advanced students, those who may with some support become adults who are first and foremost artists: dancers, musicians, authors, actors, painters etc.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Question

A colleague challenged me today. How do you know hat student learning is increased using technology. The context is our discussion about mandating technology in our pre-service teacher ed program. It is a common question that in my struggle to answer at that moment had a hard time calrifying.
Like art technology is NOT just a handmaiden to other learning. Technology at this point is to me like the arts, it is part of the fabric of our lives, not an add on. We cannot afford to teach kids in schools without art and without technology. The world is looking to us as an example of nurturing creativity while we move away from it under the guise of BACK TO BASICS. The problem is we are asking the wrong questions- the goal is not just to improve old ways of knowing- include new ones.
Written during a faculty meeting, the ultimate proof that they are not totally useless...